When one of our sons was very little and began to understand the concept of death, he would sometimes cry, "I don't want to die in a graveyard!" What he was trying to say was that he didn't want to die, but he had the two concepts merged.

Nowadays we all laugh about it. We've got an image of a man having a heart attack over an open grave and falling right into it. "It's such a time-saver!"

My five-year-old doesn't know about vampires or zombies. But she has started to pick up on the pirates-are-cool thing. I've tried to talk about how pirates weren't/aren't nice people. We may have to make a further study of the topic.